Responsive Design

[opax]

Hi,

I've been enjoying PowerApps a lot. I come with a background of custom applications, SharePoint customizations, as well as some InfoPath Forms. The general trend for years has been in responsive design. This means that you design your applications to work with variety of different devices, instead of targeting to a single device type. InfoPath has never has this, it has been awful at different devices. So with PowerApps I assumed that Responsive Design is the natural course, and I was wrong.

Althought PowerApps is build Mobile First (and Cloud First), it is not taking Responsive Design as its design principleas I assumed. I would like to build Apps that work on any device with ease, but with current PowerApps design I'm stick with X, Y, Width, Height attributes of all the controls on the application. As far as I know, there is nothing responsive in PowerApps, and I'm deeply worried how will this affect the usability of the applications.

The responsive design would be possible to achieve in PowerApps relatively easily. Instead of string X, Y, Width, Height attributes, you just drop your controls into HTML flow. As an example, look this: https://mva.microsoft.com/en-us/training-courses/building-responsive-ui-with-bootstrap-8378?l=BDfMAH...

Anyway, I do hope that PowerApps would add Responsive Design as alternative to current fixed designs availabe.

Cheers,

Olli

[Barb]

This was one of the big complaints about the predecessor to PA, Project Siena. We all begged for a responsive design and never got an answer. Project Siena was based on "AppMagic" (http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-project-siena-a-metro-style-app-for-creating-windows-8-apps/ ) and the source code showed lots of references to this. Given that they designed the whole PA environment around selecting a form factor, I think it is unlikely that this will change.

The team behind PS/PA has changed two or three times, so the newest folks started from ground zero.

I think it is crazy to have to design multiple times, but all the graphical functions are based around fixed sizes so that would seem to mean a full redesign of the app would be required. When Project Siena went silent for nearly a year, some of us were hoping that THAT was what was being done and we were discouraged, to say the least, that not only was that not done but that the functionality had changed to make it impossible to create Windows Store apps/tweak the source code in Visual Studio.

Anyway TL;DR = I don't think this will ever happen.

[opax]

Thanks for the information Barb. Let's hope you are wrong. 🙂

[JamesMilne]

If we cant get responeive design then we need some way of detecting the orientation of the device.. if we are in landscape or portorate orientation/mode..

[Eyerise]

Completely agree... the phrase is mobile first, not mobile only. If PowerApps is to become the replacement for InfoPath when building with SharePoint then it is going to need to be responsive.

[Audrie-MSFT]

Responsive design is planned, although I do not have an estimated release date yet. I will keep you posted as this approaches.

Thank you for your continued feedback and support,

Audrie

[SimonP]

This is an absolute must for us. Not practical to. Design the same app with multiple UI's

[mahonebn]

Audrie, Do you have an estimated date for Responsive Design in PowerApps? This is a must have and I belive will be a deal-breaker for lots of us.

[jusper]

Hi!

If you're looking for responsive forms, take a look at Plumsail Forms. It allows you to design fully-responsive forms and if necessary, with unique layouts for different devices. 

Plumsail Forms is built on the famous Bootstrap 4 framework that provides responsive grids and fancy controls.

[listbd]

Doh! I was just starting to play with PowerApps, but it is not worth learning without responsive design. If I knew a real target date for this then that would help.

[mgie]

@Audrie-MSFT - any news? this is really a show stopper in my organization